Pleasantly Painful, Excruciatingly Exciting: The Dominant Submissive Binary in Popular Representations of

Pleasantly Painful, Excruciatingly Exciting: The Dominant/Submissive Binary in Popular Representations of BDSM Scenes

LUCAS DE LELLIS DA SILVA

Chains, ropes, dominatrices, and a lot of latex. With the increased representation of BDSM in popular culture, the historically pathologized practice has gained a confined, yet refreshing space previously dominated by normative sexual expressions. Because of the centrality of power relations in BDSM, the practice is often informed by binaries: object versus subject, passive versus active, pleasure versus pain, dominant versus submissive. In real life, these binaries are played with and the BDSM space becomes a queer space. However, instead of queering sexuality and deconstructing the aforementioned binaries, BDSM representation in popular media has reinforced fixed binaries out of the necessity of appealing to the heteronormative gaze.

There are several ways in which one could classify the binary between who makes the action and who receives the action in BDSM. Instead of using the vocabulary of active versus passive, or subject versus object, I have decided to use the language of dominant and submissive. The reason for that is because this is the vocabulary used in BDSM itself. Using any other form of categorization would be part of constructing an argument about agency. The vocabulary of “active” and “passive” presupposes that only one of the individuals is actually putting the action forward, while the passive is only able to receive the action, as if there is no agency whatsoever involved in this interaction. The same connotation goes with the terms “subject” and “object.” In this vocabulary, the active or the subject is the one detaining all the possibilities for action. These words imply that the “active” or the “subject” has something that is withheld from the “object” or the “passive.” Therefore, I will use the language of dominant (dom) and the submissive (sub) to analyze the mediatic portrayal of their interplay.

With the concept of intersectionality in mind, the binary of submissive and dominant in the representation of BDSM scenes is inherently informed by gender identity, class, race, and sexual orientation. I decided to focus on two specific representations of monogamous interactions within BDSM: the normative heterosexual, and the queer representations. By monogamous interactions I simply mean the interaction between two people instead of a group sexual interaction. By queer, I do not only mean homossexual interactions, but rather the interaction between two inividuals in which at least one of them is not cisgender or not heterosexual. There are inherent differences in how these interactions have been portrayed. The main difference is that the queer monogamous BDSM relationship already exists outside of the expectations of normative sex, while the heterosexual BDSM potrayal tends to conform to the rules of normative sexuality. Because of that key difference, BDSM representations of normative heterosexual versus queer relationships tend to diverge accordingly. Before analysing these representations, it is necessary to delve into a discussion on violence and power within discourses of sexuality.

In The History of Sexuality, Foucault argues that the seventeenth-century marks “the beginning of an era of biopolitics.” Foucault defines this kind of politics as “a power that...endeavours to administer, optimize, and multiply [life], subjecting it to precise controls and comprehensive regulations” (The Will to Knowledge 137) which were “embodied in institutions such as the army and the schools” (The History of Sexuality 140). These power dynamics initiated a discourse on sex and sexuality that defined a ‘normal’ sex. The concept of “normal” became “heterosexual, monogamous, romantic, private, married, and suburban, while abnormal became non-heterosexual, non-monogamous, unromantic, public, unmarried, and urban” (Rubin 152). The emergence of normative sexual discourse shaped realities, produced agencies, categorized populations on the basis of sexuality, and set the truths of whose sexuality is honorable and whose sexuality is shameful.

A bit of reflection on the definition of biopower would lead us to believe that BDSM is automatically marginalized by normative biopolitics. Indeed, BDSM embraces acts that are non-heterosexual, non-monogamous, unromantic,

public, un-married, and most likely urban. However, there is an important distinction to be made: the practice of BDSM has historically diverged from its representation in popular media.

The mediatic representation of BDSM often portrays harmful normative binaries. Weiss argues that in popular media “SM is simultaneously exciting and other, and conventional and every day” (110). Contemporary representations of BDSM “reinforce[s] boundaries between normal and not normal by allowing the viewer to consume a bit of the kinky other while buttressing the privilege, authority, and essential normalcy of the self” (Weiss 114). It is no coincidence that several BDSM fictional stories result in a normative monogamous love relationship, as seen in the movies 9 ½ Weeks, The Piano Teacher, and Secretary, or it portrays BDSM subjectivities as a product of deviant pathological behavior soon to be cured, such as in the music videos Madonna’s Erotica and Christina Aguilera’s Not Myself Tonight. From the inaccuracies of Fifty Shades of Grey, that ignore respected procedures on consent, to the exoticization of bondage in Aguilera’s music video, BDSM representation in popular media has often conformed to the pathologizing, exoticizing gaze of its nonpractitioners. This gaze successfully imposes the oppressive binary of an active subject who has full power and control versus a passive object who has no agency and is completely at mercy of the agentive dominant.

However, I argue that there is power, but there is no violence in BDSM. Bauer analyzes Foucault’s Discipline and Punish to differentiate power from violence: “violence acts upon bodies, it forces and destroys, it forecloses all possibilities…A power relationship may rely on consent or violence or both, but it can only exist if there are possibilities to act, even for the one who is subjected to that power” (179). Even if it makes reference to violence, power requires some possibility of action. Violence, on the other hand, halts all possibilities, a complete shutdown of action. In a BDSM setting where there are two people who consensually engage in BDSM, we might feel inclined to think that the dominant has power over the submissive and exerts violence upon the latter. That is a misuse of the word violence and a misunderstanding of the plurality that the word power encompasses. Consent is a fundamental

part of BDSM practices. For example, there is often a safe word with the power of halting all action, which gives the submissive complete control of a determined action. In actuality, the dominant’s journey to please the submissive, and the submissive’s ability to end everything within the pronunciation of one single word gives an incomparable agency and power to the submissive. Therefore, the submissive holds a variety of possibilities for action, which is against the definition of violence stated above. The situation aforementioned exemplifies what is called the eroticization of power, an essential feature of BDSM. Ortmann defines the eroticization of power as “the way people can perceive power as having a sexually exciting dimension” (120). The transference of power from the dominant to the submissive creates fantasies that reveal the plurality of human sexuality. Therefore, the eroticization of power is a gateway to a healthy queer sexuality. In mediatic representation, the erotization of power can either reinforce pre-existent harmful binaries that are used in technologies of oppression, but it can also use the aforementioned binaries to queer power. In the scenes I analyse, when representation reinforces pre-existent harmful binaries, historically oppressed social groups are assigned the role of passive obedience, being sexually abused over and over again. When it is used to queer power, power is attributed to these same historically oppressed social groups.

We shall look into two different cases that can help us better understand the potential harm caused by problematic representation of the eroticization of power. The music video Not Myself Tonight features the pop singer Christina Aguilera wearing clothing closely associated with the BDSM culture, including gags and latex jumpsuits. With a whip in her hands, Christina is portrayed as having control over her sexual interactions with both women and men. An uncritical interpretation of the music video might assert that Aguilera is assuming a sexual subjectivity that is rarely given to women. However, Aguilera performs extreme femininity. The expression of her sexuality is only free when she presents herself as a sexual object, as a prey. Rather than assuming a sex-negative stance, I am arguing that the control she assumes is satisfying for the male gaze. Even though the queering of her sexuality happens through her sexual interactions with women, the end of the music

video concludes with a normative heterosexual relationship. The lyrics “I’m kissing all the boys and girls/Someone call the doctor cause I lost my mind” and “In the morning/When I wake up/I’ll go back to the girl I used to be” (Aguilera) further reveal a layer of pathologizing BDSM and non-normative sexualities. The music video, therefore, is made for the normative gaze. In other words, Aguilera temporarily queers her sexuality only for the purpose of entertainment.

Similarly, BDSM culture was assimilated into the blockbuster Batman Returns to construct the character of the Catwoman for the male gaze. In an iconic scene, the villainess invades Shrek’s, and starts destroying the place. Upon seeing her, the security guard, with a gun in his hand, says that he does not know whether he should “open fire or fall in love” (Burton). A bit further in the movie, upon her encounter with Batman, the character utters “meow”, in a discourteous, sexually suggestive manner. This piece of dialogue became an icon of sexual appeal in popular culture. The Catwoman also portrays conventional femininity and is until nowadays a female sexual symbol. Even after she is portrayed as having “power” over her own sexualization, in the end, the Catwoman is still portrayed as selfish, whose sexual behavior is only a tool for seducing, controlling and fooling her enemies.

I argue that the female BDSM portrayal in heterosexual settings conforms to the discourse of normative sex constructed for the male gaze. Therefore, as a result, such a portrayal does not queer sexuality and does not unveil the plurality of human sexuality, but rather eroticizes BDSM culture in order to pretend to be sex-positive and empowering to women, and only further objectifies them. Simone De Beauvoir, in the Second Sex, accounted for this type of representation as the role of “the seductress”: for women, “erotic transcendence consists of making herself prey in order to make a catch. She becomes an object, and she grasps herself as an object” (De Beauvoir 349). Through BDSM, the woman makes herself (and is made into) an object of male pleasure, and that is displayed as taking control of her own sexuality. The fantasy of female empowerment through the portrayal of dominatrices end as soon as the men have access to her flesh — exactly what happens at the end of Aguilera’s Not Myself Tonight: she will become “herself” again, after the

touch of her flesh by her male heterosexual partner. This means that even though Aguilera and the Catwoman are portrayed as dominatrices, they are confined to the objectification of their male counterparts. The traditional expected sexual behavior of women being passive is temporarily broken for the entertainment of male expectators, but in the end these representations push their female characters into object position, thus reinforcing traditional oppressive binaries.

Realizing that the appropriation of BDSM symbols and icons in popular media was not working in favor of the free expression of sexuality in normative heterosexual relationships, I turned to the analysis of queer BDSM relationships. This shall make clear weather the media portrayal of BDSM sexualities is directly related to heterosexual understandings of sexuality. I turned to two TV Shows: Queer as Folk and Pose. Both of them explore the lives of non-heterosexual people, focusing largely on expressions of LGBTQ+ culture.

Pose is a TV show written and produced by Ryan Murphy, who is himself a queer person. The show deals with the New York ballroom culture in the 80s, and gives voice to Latinx and African American characters. The series portrays dozens of trans, non-heterosexual, and gender non-conforming individuals gaining international recognition for its diverse cast. One of the main characters of the show, Eureka, was in a relationship with a male character who was wealthy and financially sustained her, but did not support Eureka’s plan of going through sex reassignment surgery, which resulted in her breaking up with him. In the second season of the show, she is paid to perform the role of a dominatrix in a BDSM dungeon. She finds empowerment through her role, as it gives her financial independence to survive, giving her a chance to make a revival in the ballroom scene without resorting to prostitution or without having to seduce “her man” back. We cannot undermine the importance of her financial independence: the BDSM scene gave her a chance to live again. However, in a certain moment of her job, while she is taking a break, another trans person who works as a dominatrix comments on her clients: “[s]ometimes I feel bad for these guys… too scared to feel pleasure, so they turn to pain” (“Buttlerfly/Cocoon.”). This complicates our understanding of how BDSM is portrayed. First, it is a gateway for the survival of trans women

who are systematically oppressed and can not find jobs in the mainstream workforce. BDSM is one of the few scenes in which alternative gender performances are tolerated, giving the trans character a chance to reinvent herself. On the other hand, the heterosexual white men who pay for their services are portrayed through a pathologizing language, as sexually deviant people who are “too scared” and psychologically unstable enough to aim to pursue pain. This narrative is sustained and concluded with one of Eureka’s white, powerful clients undergoing a cocaine overdose during BDSM. Under these lights, those who seek and participate in BDSM are psychologically divergent, unstable, lustful, drug-consumers, cowards, and sexually repressed persons. Before anything, it is important to highlight that characterizing this interaction as “queer” is not self-evident: the relationship between Eureka and her male clients is, of course, a heterossexual one. However, by calling it queer, I refer to the fact that Eureka’s gender identity inevitably falls under the “nonnormal” as it was historically constructed. Thus, the problematic portrayal of BDSM interactions here stems from a representation that heterosexual men who engage in sado-masoquistic practices have unhealthy desires, unhealthy lives and “too much to spend.” In this portrayal, the problem is less about reinforcing binaries but rather reinforcing the representation of men who take part in BDSM as deviants.

Older than Pose, the TV show Queer as Folk is well-known for being the first hour-long drama TV show that portrayed the life of gay men and lesbian women in the United States. One of the first portrayals of BDSM in the show happened in episode 15, directed by Alex Chapple and written by Garth Wingfield. Ted is a middle-aged gay man who feels uncomfortable with his aging, and is often portrayed as an old-fashioned, clumsy, and shy character who is constantly looking for a younger partner. He goes to an LGBTQ+ club on a “leather ball” night, where he sees a BDSM performance between two men. The club also hosts a dark room where multiple gay men are having sexual interactions with elements of BDSM. Coincidentally, Ted knows the dominant men who lead the BDSM performance: Dale Wexler, a millionaire and a past classmate of Ted. They both head to Dale’s house, where he exclaims: “[I] t’s amazing, Ted, how [BDSM] has allowed me to expand my horizons...you have no idea what can happen once you give yourself permission.” Ted,

skeptically, replies: “[to] what? To chain people up, tie people down?”, to which Dale responds: “that can be the most liberating of all... relinquishing control, allowing someone else to give you pain, pleasure. Whatever you most fear and desire. Why don’t you allow me to introduce yourself to the real Ted Schmidt?” (“The Ties that Bind.”). In this scene, the homosexual relationship is portrayed as beneficial both to the dominant and to the submissive. Dale, a rich businessperson, finds in BDSM an opportunity to liberate his feelings that are repressed by living in a heteronormative work environment. Ted, by consensually giving up all control and agency, would discover another layer of himself, and discover “the real Ted Schmidt”. The abandonment of agency comes with an erotic transcendence that allows Ted to redefine himself and how he handles his agency. The latter portrayal is not perfect, but it still offers the audience a positive light to BDSM. This representation establishes BDSM as a healthy, transcendental, and exciting form of sexuality. It unveils the experimental nature of sexuality and presents the parties involved with the potential for personal transformation.

However, we see again the same kind of image attributed to the heterossexual male in Pose: a rich, powerful, millionaire male, who strongly conforms to masculinity. It seems that BDSM in both portrayals is deemed non-accessible, only attainable for those who have enough wealth. This representation is in agreement with a historical trend that pathologizes alternative sexualities. In Queer as Folk, the absence of the opposite gender makes explicit that agency is accessible for both the submissive and the dominant. The pathologizing of Dale, the more masculine-presenting character, however, seems to conform to the notion of BDSM performative male subjectivities being inherently sexually repressed.

I have argued that the mainstream representation of BDSM does not reflect the potential that BDSM as a practice has of queering sexuality. Representation has often reinforced fixed binaries of active/passive, and object/subject. In normative heterosexual representations, as seen in Batman Returns and Not Myself Tonight, representation does not offer any type of prolonged sexual liberation for women, it rather only reinforces their objectification. It implies the binary of subject versus object, under the guise of women being

the subject. She is an agent, a subject, only to the extent that the man does not touch her flesh. In queer representations, the myth of the all-powerful rich white man is still perpetuated, and there is still a level of pathologizing towards the BDSM scene. In this representation, there is an implied rationale of the “normal” man — white, rich, powerful, straight-acting, constantly trying to free the expression of his sexuality through BDSM, either by dominating or being dominated. While this representation is more flexible towards the binary, it reinforces the pathologizing gaze of BDSM.

In real life, BDSM spaces are welcoming, consent-driven spaces in which one can fully explore the plurality of human sexuality. Queerness is often welcomed, and pre-established gender and sexual roles are turned upside-down via the eroticization of power. There is a need, therefore, for the representation of BDSM spaces to be as plural and diversifying as the practices outside of popular media. The current representation of BDSM further contributes to stigmatization and reinforces harmful binaries. More importantly, it impedes the exploration of the full spectrum of human sexuality.

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As the weekend progresses in Old Dubai, the liveliness and zest of its people grows exponentially. With wonders waiting to be found in the historic district, across the creek all the way to the souk, what better time to explore the many hidden gems scattered downtown? So, before the night falls and the sunset hues fade away, the people huddle together on a boat, making the most of their time as they float on glistening waters and take photographs on their mobile phones. In the distance, the street lamps flicker and turn on, bidding farewell to the day and the events it brought forth. Absorbing the moment, I stand a few metres away, watching as the boat sails away in the twilight, into the night.

“Sailing at Sunset” by Fizza Fatima Rana